Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome to our witnesses here this morning.
I have half a dozen questions, and I'm trying to figure out how to ask them all in seven minutes.
I'll simply put my first two questions in the way of a comment and someone may want to enlarge on those later.
To the gentleman from CARP, one of the things I see you asked for last year was income splitting. That's one of the things the government introduced. It was the same with the chambers of commerce. We've lowered the personal income tax to 15%; we've lowered the corporate income tax to 21% by January 1, and it's to go to 15% by 2012, which will give us the second-lowest corporate income tax in the G-7.
Those are carefully targeted tax breaks put in to help individuals, families, and Canadians. They're also meant to help corporations, quite frankly, to do more business, to hire more people, and to supply more jobs. That's one end of the spectrum here.
On the other end of the spectrum we have groups that are trying to find more revenues, such as those represented, for instance, by Ms. Nasser. There is always a balance between revenue generation and revenue output. That's something we shouldn't take lightly, and it is a difficult balance to find.
My first question will go to Phil Pacey. Mr. Pacey, it's nice to see you here this morning, and I appreciate the work you and your group do for Nova Scotians.
One of the challenges, again, is finding the dollars to do a number of the things you've asked, but you made one point that really intrigued me. It was about the Scottish concept of the five-sided dormers. In Lunenberg County we would call that a Lunenberg bump, and we generally attribute them more to a Dutch or German ancestry and not to a Scottish ancestry. It's interesting, and I'll follow that up another time when we have time to chat about it.
I'll just try to explain some of the obstacles we face as parliamentarians. Under the heritage lighthouse protection bill that I sponsored in the House of Commons, what we attempted to do was to actually begin a concept to make lighthouses into heritage buildings and allow community groups to take responsibility for them, especially if they were adjacent to that lighthouse. Those groups would then preserve them and protect them.
Then you get into what I talked about earlier--some of these other jurisdictional and not necessarily financial issues. Heritage buildings are actually under Environment Canada because they fall under Parks Canada. Before that they started out under Transport Canada and were transferred to DFO. So there are some really tough jurisdictional issues here that we have to sort through as parliamentarians and try to get that money to flow into all these areas. A great deal of responsibility goes with that.
I know I'm making more comments than asking questions. I'm moving over to DFO because, as the member of Parliament for South Shore--St. Margaret's, I represent a big fishery riding. Every day we face these very obstacles you talk about for rural and coastal communities. How we keep those communities alive and how we stop the out-migration of those communities is no different in parts of Halifax and Lunenberg and Queens and Shelburne counties than it is in the outports of Newfoundland. It's a big responsibility, and we continue to fund that through DFO.
For instance, there is the small craft harbours program for the harbours and wharves that are the infrastructure of these small communities. The previous government cut the funding for small craft harbours. We reinstated it. It's still not enough, and we recognize that, but how do you find more?
What I wanted to ask you concerns the Species at Risk Act, which you mentioned. How do you bring in that Species at Risk Act and find the financing for it and at the same time maintain a diverse fishery, with bycatch and all the issues surrounding it?
I know that's a rambling question.